A Liberapay team coordinates donations from multiple donors to multiple donees. Donors choose how much they want to give, donees decide how to share the money, Liberapay computes and executes the transfers from donors to donees.

Teams are for peer-to-peer donations, they can't be used by a legal entity to distribute donations to its members.

Creating a team

Becoming a team member

Once you have contributed to a team's project, ask its members to invite you. Don't forget to tell them what your username is.

Sharing the money

Teams don't have a hierarchy, all their members are equal and set their own take.

You can change your takes from your teams dashboard. It contains tables that show the nominal takes of all members for the next and previous payday, as well as an estimate of the actual amounts of money they'll receive in the next payday.

The nominal takes are the raw numbers that the members input themselves, the actual takes are computed by the system: first it sums up the nominal takes, then it computes the percentage that each take represents, and finally it applies those percentages to the available income. Nominal takes also act as maximums: the actual takes are never higher than the nominal ones, even if additional income is available.

You may wonder why we treat nominal takes as maximums instead of simple percentages. It's because having maximums allows a team to have unused income (called “leftover”), and that is good in several ways. Firstly, it provides a “cushion” that stabilizes the income of the team's members. Secondly, it eases the integration of new members into a team, because as they increase their takes they reduce the leftover instead of affecting the income of the other members. Thirdly, it allows our software to adjust the amounts that donors actually transfer to the team's members, in a way that balances the donors' contributions over time, thus making the system more fair. Finally, it encourages donating to a team even if it has already reached its funding goal, which is good for the stability of the team's income.

Regulation of take amounts

When this feature is enabled for a team, its members can't raise their takes higher than a maximum computed on the basis of the nominal takes at the time of the previous payday. This mechanism is meant to encourage inviting new contributors to join the team, by ensuring that they won't take a disproportionate share of the income in their first weeks.

The limit works like this: you can always increase your take to 1.00 if it was below that, you can double your take compared to the previous week, you can raise your take to claim the team's leftover income, and you can bring your take up to the level of the median take in the previous payday. Whichever of these possibilities results in the highest amount is your maximum take for the week.

Takes are not limited if the team has only one member, or if the previous week's takes were all zero (which is the case for any new team that has been created after the most recent payday).